Streamline Publishing

Internationally known artist Matt Ryder works out of the coastal-mountain region around the city of Dubai, U.A.E. Originally from the UK, he found himself in Dubai a bit more than 15 years ago (life choices unrelated to art). And he liked it, so he decided to stay and build a career there.

Though he has branched into portraits and seascapes of late, early on he settled...

Carl Bretzke spent 30 years as a surgeon before he became a full-time painter — and the transition, it turns out, was less dramatic than it sounds. Both disciplines, he will tell you, are fundamentally about seeing. “In medicine, you see what you know,” he says. “In painting, you paint what you see. You must know it, to see it, to paint it.”

That philosophy drives ever...

By Thomas Jefferson Kitts

In nature, wind bends trees, water snakes downhill, and clouds come and go. Nothing is symmetrical — yet nothing feels out of balance. To strike that same equilibrium in your work, visualize the composition as a seesaw, with a child at one end and her mother at the other, then look for ways to achieve balance. 

Her...

Richard Thomas Scott and Jordan Nobuko Baker are painters, partners, and — this summer — collaborators on Fantastic Refuge, a joint exhibition at La Galerie L’Oeil du Prince in Biarritz, France. The gallery’s name translates as “Eye of the Prince,” a French idiom for the theater’s best seat — the one from which the whole scene comes into view. It’s an apt metaphor for ...

A great portrait subject, Lyn Diefenbach will tell you, announces itself. Strong angles. Definite personality. That instinct for the subject — the ability to see a face and immediately understand what it offers a painter — is the first step in Diefenbach’s portrait process. The second is getting out of the way of what you see, and letting the values do the work.